


One If By Land, Two If By Sea (1/1)

by earlgreytea68



Series: Chaosverse [8]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-03
Updated: 2009-10-03
Packaged: 2017-10-23 11:00:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/249557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlgreytea68/pseuds/earlgreytea68
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor gives Rose a history lesson. Rose gives the Doctor something else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One If By Land, Two If By Sea (1/1)

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [](http://jlrpuck.livejournal.com/profile)[**jlrpuck**](http://jlrpuck.livejournal.com/) , who did one of her patented awesome rapid-fire betas on this for me.
> 
> This is what happens when I go on walking tours of Boston. There is clearly something wrong with me.

“It didn’t happen like that,” the Doctor insisted, from underneath the console.

“This,” complained Rose, “is why I don’t try to learn history around you.”

His head poked out, affronted. “What? Why?”

“Because every time I learn something, you insist that’s not how it really happened, because you were there, and, in fact, _you_ were the hero of the entire event, but no history book ever writes about you.”

“Okay.” The Doctor pulled himself up to standing. “First of all, that’s true, the history books never include me, and I am possibly the single-most important historical force of all time.” He ignored Rose’s snort. “Second of all, you’re not reading a history book, you’re reading a poem. A poem written eighty years after the event it’s chronicling. He wasn’t there, nobody was alive who could remember it, he even admits that in the poem!” He turned toward the console, then back to Rose. “And it’s a bad poem!”

Rose’s lips twitched. “What did Longfellow do to you?”

“The man was a surprisingly good poker player,” the Doctor grumbled, turning to the console. “Who would have thought?”

Rose grinned at his back. He was really so adorable. She closed the book and stood, leaving it behind on the captain’s chair and wandering over to the console. “So.”

“So?” he echoed.

“Let’s go.”

“Let’s go where?”

“You want me to learn what really happened on the eighteenth of April in ’75? Let’s go.”

“Really?”

“Well, if you can get the date right, that is.”

“Ah, that’s a challenge.”

“Maybe,” she allowed, coquettishly, leaning against the console as he danced around her, punching and pounding and pulling at buttons and knobs and levers, until they landed with a hard jerk that sent her staggering slightly into him.

He straightened her. “Okay. Let’s go.”

He grabbed his coat and opened the door of the TARDIS, and they stepped outside. They had landed in a narrow, damp alley, and Rose wrinkled her nose a bit, because it smelled the way times before modern plumbing always smelled. She followed the Doctor who, hands in his pockets, had begun walking. They emerged out of the alley, onto docks, bustling with workers and some scarlet-coated soldiers who were trying not to look obvious in their scarlet coats. It was dusk, the sun setting swiftly behind the city.

“We are bang on time,” announced the Doctor, pleased.

Rose, eyes shaded against the sun, frowned at the city’s skyline. “’S a lot of steeples,” she said. “How did they know which one to look at?”

“Welllllll, for starters…” The Doctor shifted Rose slightly, so that she was looking out over a much flatter area of the city, from which a single steeple emerged, overshadowing the small buildings around it. “It’s that one. Tallest building in Boston right now. So it’s noteworthy.” The Doctor set off in the direction of the steeple he’d indicated. “Also, the city is under a curfew. These lanterns will be the only lights in a steeple in Boston tonight. Immediately noticeable.” He paused and held out his hand to her.

She smiled and took it and walked beside him. He was babbling, something about a flood of molasses or something, pulling them through a rabbit warren of streets, until she had little concept of where they’d left the TARDIS.

“Here we are,” said the Doctor, as they reached the church. People were bustling to their houses, the streets starting to clear, the curfew clearly coming into effect. The Doctor tried the door, found it locked, and covertly zapped the sonic screwdriver over it, opening it and stepping aside so she could go in first.

The church was smaller than she’d expected, maybe only a dozen or so pews leading up to the altar. There was a second level looking down over the first, but the ceiling was just above that. No soaring cathedral, this. “Cozy,” she said, turning in a circle. “How d’you get to the steeple?”

The Doctor walked down the main aisle a short distance, then turned back and pointed upward. Rose followed and looked up at the organ. “Up there,” he said, “behind the organ, there’s a doorway. Brisk trot up fourteen stories to the steeple where Robert Newman will hang the lanterns.”

“One if by land and two if by sea,” said Rose.

“Yes, Longfellow did get that much right.”

“So, we going up there?”

“Nah. Nowhere for us to hide up there. Anyway, the action’s going to take place down here.” The Doctor was wandering around the church now, examining the altar.

“What action?” said Rose.

“See?” The Doctor sniffed and studied the pulpit. “Longfellow left the whole thing out.” The Doctor kept wandering. “There’s going to a bust of George Washington in this church someday. Of course, nobody knows who he is now.”

The pews were actually small, enclosed boxes, squares containing a single bench and surrounded by partitions a few feet high. Rose opened the door to one of them and sat on the bench inside. The space was warmly decorated, with a rich carpet and a silky fabric covering the walls of it. There was an excellent view of the pulpit elevated above her, but the walls of the little box rose over her head, sitting down as she was. She could really see nothing _but_ the pulpit.

The Doctor appeared, leaning on the door to the box.

“I like these pews,” she told him.

“Families owned them.” He opened the door to join her. “They decorated them. You know.” The Doctor sat on the bench beside her and stretched his legs out. “This was General Gage’s church. The General in charge of the British forces in Boston. He worshipped here. It’s the tallest building in Boston, but the Sons of Liberty also had a bit of a sense of humor.”

Rose snuggled against him. “So,” she said. “Tell me what’s going to happen.”

“Wellllllll.” He shifted into story-telling mode. She could tell he was relishing it. “Around ten o’clock or so, Robert Newman is going to enter the church and go up to the steeple. Newman’s the caretaker of the church, so he has the key to all the doors. Easy for him. He’ll get up to the top and he’ll light two lanterns in the steeple. They’ll stay lit less than a minute, but it’s long enough for the revolutionaries to get the message. Also long enough for the British to notice. There’s a curfew, remember. As I said, the lights are going to stand out.”

“And what happens when the British notice?”

“They show up at the church. At this time, there were revolutionaries all over Boston. General Gage was having a devil of a time stomping them out. That was the reason for the curfew in the first place. The lanterns in the steeple are revolutionaries at work, Gage wants to capture them.”

“So the British show up here…” prompted Rose.

“They go about breaking down the front door there, the one we came through. Can’t just waltz in, because Newman was careful to lock up behind himself when he let himself in. But Newman’s still descending from the steeple—fourteen stories, remember—so he’s trapped inside.”

“Is he captured?”

The Doctor shook his head and pointed to a window to the right of the altar. “See that? In the future, it’s going to be known as the Newman Window. He escapes out that window, before the army can finish breaking into the church, and he goes home.”

“Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy?” asked Rose, teasingly.

He winked at her, then admitted, “Not quite. You see, the British had to break the door down. So they surmised that whoever had lit the lanterns didn’t have to break into the church to do it. He had a key. And who was the only person in Boston with a key to the Old North Church? The caretaker, Robert Newman. The army goes to Newman’s house and arrests him.”

Rose winced. “They don’t hang him, do they?”

“Oh, no.” The Doctor chuckled. “Actually, he’s never convicted. He has the only key, but, as Newman’s escape indicated, there was a window open in the church. Anyone could have slipped in from the back. And no one could place Newman at the scene, because no one was wandering around Old North Church: there was a curfew. The British were hoisted by their own petard. So to speak.”

“A happy ending, then.”

“Not for the British, Rose.” The Doctor tsk’d at her. “For shame. It’s your mother country.”

Rose laughed. The church was quiet and chilly and dark. The Doctor had an arm draped over her shoulders, a hand dangling near to the curve of her breast, and, next to her ear, his left heart was thudding away. Rose listened to it, counting the beats, wondering what time it was. The Doctor was still talking to her, his monologue jumping all over the place, from something about pirate’s booty to something about crypts to something about crumpets. Rose let his voice wash over her, settled in the cozy, silent dimness of their box. It was like being in their own little world, she thought. The rest of the world was out there, somewhere, just beyond the wood that formed the walls around them, but it all seemed very far away, the way it did when they were in the TARDIS. Just the two of them. The Doctor and Rose. Rose and the Doctor.

Rose looked at the empty pulpit over them, and listened to the silence beyond the Doctor’s voice, and thought that it seemed like the most perfect place to torture the Doctor she could ever encounter. She smiled. He was constantly torturing her. He would press her against a wall and kiss her until her hips bucked against him, and then step away and say they were in need of milk. Or he would stand very close to her, hand on her abdomen and breath in her ear, and whisper that it was completely illegal for him to touch her on this planet, moving away and leaving her aching. So it made the sex that eventually followed fantastic when it finally happened. That didn’t mean he didn’t deserve a little punishment for being such a bloody tease.

“—parades,” he was saying. “Just random parades, through the streets. Feasts for saints and such but they don’t need much of—”

Rose rested her hand over his crotch, momentarily silencing the Doctor.

“—Much of a—” he tried again after a second.

Rose danced her fingers down the path of his zipper.

“—Much of an excuse, Rose, what are you doing?”

“Nothing,” she said, innocently, unbuttoning his trousers.

“It doesn’t really…” He watched her hand tug down his zipper. “It doesn’t really seem like nothing.”

“Well,” she remarked, reaching into his pants to cup him. “We started at nothing, but we seem to be getting somewhere.”

His eyes closed of their own accord. He would have protested her description of starting with nothing, but Rose had shifted, now freeing him from pants and trousers entirely, and all he did was hear himself hum approval instead.

Rose closed a hand around him and stroked gently.

“Not that I don’t applaud what you’re doing,” he gasped, “but…” He trailed off, preoccupied with Rose’s hand.

“But what?” she breathed into his ear, and then lifted her freehand to scrape her nails teasingly along his scalp, which earned her, as it usually did, a sound like a purr. “No one can see us. Well.” She drew back and looked at his head. He was taller than her, so the thicket of his hair was visible over the top of the partition behind them. “No one will see us if you shift a bit.”

He slid down a bit on the bench obediently, even as he said, “This isn’t what the walls are for, Rose, they’re to…to…” He watched her slide off the bench, to her knees in front of him, and arch an eyebrow at him. “Trap heat…” he finished, lamely.

“Oh,” she said, voice pitched low. “But how did they get these boxes hot in the first place. Naughty colonists. So uncivilized.” And she leaned down and took him in her mouth.

The Doctor never was able to adequately brace himself for that moment of being surrounded by Rose. No matter how many times it had happened—and the fact that it had happened as often as it had was astonishing—it still felt better than he remembered or anticipated. His breath tripped for a second, and, in reaction, he leaned his head back with a gasp.

She released him. “Although, they quite thoughtfully carpeted this place, so I take it back. _Extremely_ civilized. I approve. Do you?”

“ _Love_ the colonists,” he assured her, and she smiled and leaned down to suck.

The trick to this whole thing, she thought, was to keep him off-balance. She sucked and licked and alternated hand and mouth, all without letting herself fall into a rhythm, and he squirmed restlessly and whimpered at her.

She pulled back entirely, waiting until he blinked open his eyes and looked at her dazedly.

“How long,” she whispered, “until Newman shows up?”

“What?” he asked, blankly.

“Newman. With the lanterns.”

He stared at her, hair mussed and lips wet. What the bloody hell was she talking about? “Why are you stopping? That is entirely unfair. I’ll lodge a complaint.”

She looked amused. “With who?”

“With…me. Myself. I’ll be conscious of the complaint against you. You just wait.”

Smiling, she leaned forward and pulled him into her mouth again, humming around him. He groaned.

She released him. “You have to be quiet,” she said, and then licked him. “We’re getting visitors.”

He nodded blindly, as she closed her mouth around him and sucked. He gasped.

“Quiet,” she said again, “or I’ll have to stop.”

“Don’t stop,” he muttered, thickly.

She took him in her mouth again, and now she was setting a rhythm, and she felt _divine_ , and he was so terribly close. He lost the battle, arching up into her mouth before he could stop himself, and then, suddenly, she was gone.

“Rose,” he protested. “Don’t—let me—“

She clapped her hand over his mouth. “Shh,” she hissed, listening to the key at the door. The door opened. The Doctor heaved for breath, underneath the half-sprawl of her body, and it sounded absurdly loud to her in the church, but Newman’s steps didn’t hesitate. She heard him climb the stairs, heard his footsteps in the balcony overhead, heard the creak of another door and more footsteps getting farther away.

The Doctor had apparently had enough, shifting to pull at her, startling her enough that she slipped her hand off his mouth to catch her balance, and he kissed her, hard and urgently. “Mmm,” she said into his mouth, and kissed him back. She could always kiss the Doctor forever, losing all track of time, but she remembered herself this time around. She didn’t have much time until the British army showed up at the door, and she needed the Doctor coherent by then, which meant she had a job to finish.

She pulled away from the kiss, extracting herself from his grip, and slid down his body, back to the erection she’d abandoned so unceremoniously. His hands closed into her hair, and she knew he was very, very close, and she heard him say her name, begging her, even as the army began knocking loudly and angrily on the door, and Rose thought she couldn’t have timed it any more perfectly, because when he climaxed it was with a shout, and luckily it coincided with a particularly fervent bang against the door.

The Doctor, relaxing from the climax, became aware of the fact that, well, wherever he was sitting was bloody uncomfortable. He was shifted to an odd angle, his neck tilted rather painfully, and, by God, it was _loud_. You’d think there was an army trying to get in…

He sat up abruptly. “What did you _do_?” he hissed at Rose, trying to look dignified while he rearranged his pants and trousers.

“It’s called ‘fellatio,’” she explained to him.

“In a _church_ , Rose!”

“Don’t worry, you didn’t say the Lord’s name in vain.”

“On April 18, 1775!”

“Longfellow should write a poem about it.”

“Shhh,” he hissed, and she heard it at the same time, footsteps, running across the balcony, down the staircase, racing down the aisle toward the window the Doctor had pointed out to her. They were still sunk far enough into the pew that Robert Newman didn’t even give them a passing glance.

The Doctor peeked carefully over the partition.

“Is the coast clear?” asked Rose.

The Doctor turned to her and then took her entirely by surprise by kissing her quickly and fiercely. “This,” he said, “is the best historical event _ever_.”

Rose grinned. “Glad to hear it.”

“And I’m going to get you back for this, you know. When you least expect it.”

“Oh, I’m counting on it.”

“Excellent. Now let’s get out of here before we change history.”

They stood up just as the door to the Old North Church gave way. For a second, the British army and the Doctor and Rose all regarded each other.

“May be too late for that,” remarked Rose.

“Run,” said the Doctor.


End file.
